Kyle Jussab - PixelPulse

Description

Designed to meet the lack of helpful resources available to UoL Computer Science, PixelPulse aims to serve as both inspiration (project based modules) and revision (theory based modules). Users can create an account, log in, and post their p5js sketches. Users can also like and comment on others’ posts. After extensive research ASP Team 54 found a lack of interactive educational resources and after multiple user tests we assured our assumptions that this is a product students would benefit from!

Retrospective

The first meaningful team project I’ve been a part of. It was fun to add game elements to a web application and have a significant influence on the look and feel of this project. The team definitely wasn’t perfect, but we all fostered an environment of trust and honest work. We all grew with this application, learning along the way, keeping a schedule, and documenting all our progress. Seeing my visual design skills improve with this project compared to previous projects, and noticing my current design skills being better than they were when I did PixelPulse, is very motivating. I see tangible evidence of my growth as a creator and a designer. And though it can’t technically be seen, I’m getting much better as a programmer as well.

Tech Stack

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQLite3, Node.js

Make it look pretty

My CSS skills were growing after the two prior web development classes I took. I found that CSS and JS were the more entertaining parts of building the website. Fortunately for me, the rest of the team was more comfortable with backend development, which gave me the platform to grow my skills even further.

This project was a place to experiment. I could have used libraries or frameworks that would make the process a lot easier, but I have a mindset of learning the core of it. Yes, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but that doesn’t mean having the knowledge of how to make the wheel is a bad thing. I think having a strong foundation in the most basic languages and techniques enables me to learn new frameworks much better and faster. While it’s impossible to be proficient at everything, I would like to make the process of learning something new much more streamlined and effective.

Keep it modern

The aesthetic was made as minimal as possible, mimicking that of popular social media platforms. This was done for familiarity; we found that users were used to a specific layout and style and if we differed from that too much it wouldn’t have the social media feel.

All decisions were made with feedback from our stakeholders. As a team we conducted multiple user surveys and tests to which I iterated on. No decision was made without taking into consideration our extensive research and our user responses.

Accessibility was a very important feature that I pushed to add. The accessibility menu is something I’ve iterated on over the course of developing multiple websites. It offers much more customizability to try and help users as much as possible. Aside from building an accessible website using ARIA and best practices, it was important to me that users had some level of customization to better tweak the website to their needs. Using localStorage I was able to keep the users’ preferences for the next time they navigated to PixelPulse.